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Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number he seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into the shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary Elkinghorn there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation with her old school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer had never met the latter lady before, he joined them and walked beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary’s brilliance. The situation was a difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. “He struck me,” she said afterwards with a luminous self-contradiction, “as a very unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things to be helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn’t know what it was?”
At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park were crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along the belt which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted over the lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park, in a series of brilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying machine. Filmer walked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was supremely and conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the president of the Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close behind with the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean of Stays. Banghurst was large and copious in speech, and such interstices as he left were filled in by Hickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked between them saying not a word except by way of unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs. Banghurst listened to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation of the Dean with that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten years of social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the Lady Mary watched, no doubt with an entire confidence in the world’s disillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the sort of man she had never met before.
There was some cheering as the central party came into view of the enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering. They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a hasty glance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies behind them, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated since the house had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse, and he cut in on Banghurst in mid-sentence on Progress.
“I say, Banghurst,” he said, and stopped.
“Yes,” said Banghurst.
“I wish – ” He moistened his lips. “I’m not feeling well.”
Banghurst stopped dead. “Eh?” he shouted.
“A queer feeling.” Filmer made to move on, but Banghurst was immovable. “I don’t know. I may be better in a minute. If not – perhaps… MacAndrew – ”
“You’re not feeling WELL?” said Banghurst, and stared at his white face.
“My dear!” he said, as Mrs. Banghurst came up with them, “Filmer says he isn’t feeling WELL.”
“A little queer,” exclaimed Filmer, avoiding the Lady Mary’s eyes. “It may pass off – ”
There was a pause.
It came to Filmer that he was the most isolated person in the world.
“In any case,” said Banghurst, “the ascent must be made. Perhaps if you were to sit down somewhere for a moment – ”
“It’s the crowd, I think,” said Filmer.
There was a second pause. Banghurst’s eye rested in scrutiny on Filmer, and then swept the sample of public in the enclosure.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Sir Theodore Hickle; “but still – I suppose – Your assistants – Of course, if you feel out of condition and disinclined – ”
“I don’t think Mr. Filmer would permit THAT for a moment,” said Lady Mary.
“But if Mr. Filmer’s nerve is run – It might even be dangerous for him to attempt – ” Hickle coughed.
“It’s just because it’s dangerous,” began the Lady Mary, and felt she had made her point of view and Filmer’s plain enough.
Conflicting motives struggled for Filmer.
“I feel I ought to go up,” he said, regarding the ground. He looked up and met the Lady Mary’s eyes. “I want to go up,” he said, and smiled whitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. “If I could just sit down somewhere for a moment out of the crowd and sun – ”
Banghurst, at least, was beginning to understand the case. “Come into my little room in the green pavilion,” he said. “It’s quite cool there.” He took Filmer by the arm.
Filmer turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. “I shall be all right in five minutes,” he said. “I’m tremendously sorry – ”
The Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. “I couldn’t think – ” he said to Hickle, and obeyed the compulsion of Banghurst’s pull.
The rest remained watching the two recede.
“He is so fragile,” said the Lady Mary.
“He’s certainly a highly nervous type,” said the Dean, whose weakness it was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with enormous families, as “neurotic.”
“Of course,” said Hickle, “it isn’t absolutely necessary for him to go up because he has invented – ”
“How COULD he avoid it?” asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest shadow of scorn.
“It’s certainly most unfortunate if he’s going to be ill now,” said Mrs. Banghurst a little severely.
“He’s not going to be ill,” said the Lady Mary, and certainly she had met Filmer’s eye.
“YOU’LL be all right,” said Banghurst, as they went towards the pavilion. “All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought to be you, you know. You’ll be – you’d get it rough, you know, if you let another man – ”
“Oh, I want to go,” said Filmer. “I shall be all right. As a matter of fact I’m almost inclined NOW – . No! I think I’ll have that nip of brandy first.”
Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty decanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps five minutes.
The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals Filmer’s face could be seen by the people on the easternmost of the stands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out, and then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind the grand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward with a tray.
The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old bureau – for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was hung with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books. But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes played with on the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer went up and down that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma he went first towards the neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad and then towards the neat little red label
“.22 LONG.”
The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.
Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun, being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only by a lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst’s butler opened the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says, what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst’s household had guessed something of what was going on in Filmer’s mind.
All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a man should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact – though to conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible – that Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed “like